All the Wrong Places
by Kukui
Summary: Ayana is a hardworking young girl at Endeavor Hero Agency, passionate about helping pro-heroes despite her quirkless nature. But what her coworkers don't know is that she isn't who she pretends to be. At night, she is the vigilante Puppeteer, who is rapidly rising in fame among the public. She isn't quirkless and has a deep hatred for pro-heroes. AizawaXOCXHawks?


**i. **

"_Say senpai, what do you make of this vigilante, the Puppeteer? He's been the talk of the town these days in Hosu. It seems every day more and more people are speaking up about his heroic deeds. Just the other day I was on the subway and I overheard someone talk about how the Puppeteer apprehended a thief and returned her purse."_

_Capes and Lunatics _was Ayana's favorite podcast, even though they were just two guys feeding into the sensationalism journalism trend. Their main topic revolved around recent pro-hero scandals, but their favorite and most popular topic was on the rising in fame vigilante the Puppeteer. _Such a millennial listening to that piece of trash, _her coworker would grumble at her every time she started playing it on her laptop.

"_Well if you ask me, I think this Puppeteer guy is a big phony, probably some low-life high-school dropout who thinks they can play hero. I'm not a fan. All the pro-heroes had to work hard to get to where they are today through training and legal qualifications, we can't go around making exceptions just because this guy has been getting pretty popular among the public and is good at playing pretend-hero. When the real deal comes around, like some major catastrophe, he's going to get himself hurt or worse put a lot of people at risk because he never got the correct training. Rules about misusing quirks were created for a reason. So if you're listening to this Puppeteer, I think you best stop what you're doing while you can and let the real heroes do their jobs."_

"_Woah Shima-senpai, do you think that the Puppeteer is really listening to our podcast?"_

"_The guy seems like he'd be an egotistical manic to me, I would bet money that he is."_

Click.

Ayana settled back into her seat, closed her eyes, and rubbed her temples in hopes of relieving herself of an oncoming headache.

_God, it's been such a long day._

"Wonder if they'll let me take part in that bet." Her coworker cackled from her laptop screen. "I like listening to that podcast, _Capes and Lunatics_ was it? Turn it back on Ayana, I'd like to hear more about this Puppeteer."

Her coworker, if she could even technically call him that: Dr. Daruma, her supervisor technically, in his sixties if she had to guess, a deranged doctor who probably didn't have any medical license, eccentric and obsessed with his precious babies he called _Nomus_. She bit her lip to stop herself from being snippy with the older man. Dr. Daruma stared at her with his beady eyes, the need to rudely end the facetime with him was almost irresistible.

"Were you expecting them to sing praises of you, _Miss Puppeteer_? I still don't understand why you like playing hero so much."

"What's there not to understand? It's because the pro-heroes do such a piss poor job," she replied succinctly.

"Still got that grudge I see. It's been years already hasn't it? Remind me never to get on your bad side."

"If you get on my bad side, I'll make sure you won't even know it."

"Wow, a death threat? Not very heroic. By the way, why on earth are you pretending to be a man?"

"I'm not," Ayana responded, a little defensively, and after a short pause she added, "The public is just sexist."

Ayana had been posing as the Puppeteer on and off for almost three years. In that time she had accomplished an unofficial record of apprehending over two-hundred small-time thugs and thieves and been recognized by members of the police and other pro-heroes as a troublesome vigilante who must be caught precisely twice: the first time after she decided to knock out some escaping bank robbers (she was conveniently at the bank withdrawing money); the second after she knocked out a pro-hero (she couldn't just let herself get caught so easily).

"I'm done, anything else you want me to do?" asked Ayana.

Her nighttime job was crude, crass, and nasty but it paid well. They ship her a body, so distorted and mangled with superhuman abilities called _quirks_, it's no longer human. Her job was to use her own quirk to make sure Dr. Daruma's babies were in tip top shape. _Body Snatcher _was what her coworkers called it. She could produce specific pheromones, masking them with her perfume of the day to make them more subtle, and control another's body. One whiff and she was the _puppeteer_, their bodies were hers to control, right down to their cells. For example (and this is just one example), if a _nomu _ever began to have adverse reactions to their foreign quirks, similar to how a transplantee would reject a transplanted organ, she could simply force the _nomu's_ immune system to shut down. And of course, on a very basic level, she could force someone to do something as small as doing her chores to making them go as far as killing themselves.

_A villainous quirk._

"No, you can go play hero now."

"My payment?"

Around the same time as when she started her career as the mysterious vigilante Puppeteer, she was approached by a shady man who offered her enough money to comfortably support a family of five in exchange for the use of her quirk. The man never gave her a name, simply telling her to call him Sensei. He was strangely kind to her, occasionally dropping an impromptu call just to see if she was taking good care of herself and if she needed more money or something of the sort. He'd also frequently send her text messages via Line to praise her on her work as the Puppeteer and to reiterate how much he fully supports her on doing whatever made her happy. Really, the whole thing was super bizarre to her, he was like a model father figure: caring, supportive, and easy-going - and as if he needed to play up his father persona more, he even texted like a dad with his over-usage (not to mention inappropriate usage) of emojis. But Ayana wasn't so easily fooled by his seemingly harmless character.

"Yes, yes, I will tell the boss what a great job you did."

"Good night, thank you for your hard work," she dipped her head to her laptop screen.

"So polite, already in hero mode?" teased the doctor.

"No," she mumbled, which elicited a smirk from the old man. "Just a force of habit."

"Have a good night, Ayana."

Her laptop screen turned black, a few seconds later it returned to her floral background. The secure connection had been dropped, and her laptop was returned back to its original state without a single trace of anything illegal to be found anywhere on the device. She reached over and closed the top and shuffled around in the dimness to clean up her workstation. By force of habit she glanced at the tanks of _nomu_ lined neatly in front of her just to make sure none of them were crawling out of the water to come after her.

_So goddamn creepy, couldn't they have made them look prettier or something?_

Beep. Ayana saw the notification pop up across her phone screen just as she went to grab it off her work desk: _Senshū Bank acct 3291: ¥1,080,000 trnsfr from ORIG CO NAME: RHINO STOR. DIRECT DEPOSIT on May 16, 20xx at 1:39 AM JST._

_That was fast._

Beep. Beep. Another notification popped up across her screen, this time from Line, showing that she had a message to check. With how randomly _Sensei _checked in on her she had to keep the messages private, though he never once texted her anything shady. To anyone, if they happened to look over her shoulder while she texted him back and read any of her conversations with the man, it really seemed he was a doting father talking to a daughter.

_I gave you a little extra money to go treat yourself. Get home safely, Ayana._

She replied immediately, out of obligation, she had to stay on his good side. Just like the _nomus _she worked on, they all had to give in and adjust if they wanted to survive. She'd only get hurt if she fought back, unfortunately, she only learned that all too recently.

_Thanks._

Ayana made sure the door behind her shut firmly. The building itself was immaculately innocent looking on the outside, especially with "Rhino Self-Storage" written in huge letters on the front alongside a cute little logo displaying a smiling rhino in a mover's uniform carrying a cardboard box. It was a perfect disguise for the not-so-cute activities happening within its walls.

The place was located on the outskirts of Kamino in Yokohama, about an hour commute back to her apartment in the heart of Tokyo. She groaned and was tempted to phone another one of her "coworkers" to teleport her home. Ayana decided against it since she didn't like any of them and preferred to stay out of sight and out of mind whenever she could. With a tight twenty minutes on the schedule to get to the train station, she quickened her pace. If she missed this upcoming train, she would have to wait another hour before the next one came, and she really wanted to be in bed as soon as she could considering her daytime job started at 9AM.

She was halfway to the station when she was stopped by two drunks. What happened in the next few minutes was bit of a blur; they'd only began to sexual harass her when her quirk activated and then _thump thump _the two of them collapsed at her feet in a deep slumber. She blinked at them wearily, she didn't even feel herself activating her quirk, but the work was hers alright. The familiar zing beneath her skin told her so.

Ring. Ring. Ayana jolted, only a select few people would call her at this hour.

_Unknown Caller._

She grimaced, if it was from _them _why didn't they text her like usual?

"Hello? This is Ayana."

"6PM tomorrow, come over for a drink and let's have a chat. I will send you the address. Please don't be late." A deep male voice came through.

"Let's make it 6:45PM, I get out of work at 5 and with how bad traffic is in Tokyo I know I'll probably be cutting it close to make a meeting at 6." She responded immediately.

"Very well, we will see you at 6:45 tomorrow."

Click.Right after he hung up, her phone buzzed with a green Line message notification. She opened the app and saw that the man had sent her a street address and a semi-polite message reminding her not to be late again.

Beep._ We look forward to meeting you._

xxx

Ayana, at twenty-two, balancing two paying jobs and one _extra-curricular _when duty called, often required several cups of coffee and had intense bags under her eyes, which she covered up with a copious amount of concealer. She did not have a lot of free time on her hands, or so people thought, but since she had been out of school, she had become a master of procrastination. Between nine o'clock in the morning and noon, she could find half a dozen ways of deferring the moment at which she had to start work. A couple minutes of perusing through Twitter, watching the news on the TV in her office, chatting with the newer recruits about good social media habits (which would start off as work-related but then actually turn into something more along the lines of "Hey did you see that viral video of All-Might?" or "I have to show you guys this cute otter stacking cups on Youtube"). These were the standards of how she started her daytime job at Endeavor Hero Agency - and, as far as anyone was concerned, entirely legitimate tactics to avoid coming in contact with the fiery hero himself to discuss his poor public ratings. Lucky for her, she was his Chief Executive of Public Relations and Marketing, which meant she was allowed a little more freedom in scheduling her own visits with the boss-man, though she had only earned the position because she was practically the only one left in her department. Very few people could deal with the number two hero, but Ayana could, even though it was just barely.

Today, she had decided to spend her morning staring at the news channel in the break room.

"_Newcomer Mt. Lady apprehends the Rush-Hour Terrorist with a note-worthy display of her gigantification quirk."_

"Maybe if you didn't waste your time just sitting here, you'd actually accomplish your tasks without sacrificing sleep and not have such ugly looking bags under your eyes," her friend scolded when he spotted her in the breakroom. His eyes went straight to the patches of black peeking through her concealer under her eyes. "Did you sleep at all last night?"

She did sleep for a few hours after getting home, but the dread she felt at the 6:45PM meeting the following day kept her from getting anything restful with the already meager hours.

"No, I was up late with my other job." She sighed and rubbed at her tired eyes in hopes of erasing away the sleepiness. This action didn't help and only smudged her concealer around, making the dark circles more noticeable.

"Get some more sleep, this isn't healthy."

"I will Native, thanks for your concern."

The pro-hero, decked out in stereotypical Native American attire (which Ayana thought was rather inappropriate considering that it could be very clearly counted as cultural appropriation), made a brief moment of eye contact with her that suggested he was skeptical of that promise. But just as he was about to open his mouth to scold her again, one of their newest pro-hero came skidding in, obviously very excited about the prospect of showing up Mt. Lady from this morning. Ayana and Native both batted exactly one eyelash at the rookie before turning their attention back to finishing up their conversation.

"Maybe you should consider asking Endeavor for a vacation. I'm sure he'll give it to you. I know he's scary, but he can't just work you to death. Or honestly, you could just disappear for a few days and probably no one here would say anything. It's not like the agency will burn to a crisp if you take a week or two off, no pun intended there." Native said to her as he began walking out with his partner Typhoon.

"Hey now, are you trying to say I'm not important to this agency? Just because I'm quirkless doesn't mean you can just discriminate against me like this."

"No, never! That's not what I meant. You're super important Ayana!"

"I'm kidding, don't get your panties all in a knot." She smirked at the sight of her friend's burning blush. He was way too easy to get worked up. "Have a safe and boring patrol."

"What? No! I want something exciting. Don't jinx us Ayana-senpai!" Typhoon piped in.

With the two pro-heroes gone from sight, she gave a sigh and decided she should probably get to work on organizing the staggering requests to interview Endeavor along with many of the other heroes who worked at his agency. She had put aside work for way too long.

xxx

She left work right up on the dot at 5PM. Ayana had looked up the street address given to her yesterday on her computer and gotten a pretty good street view of the building. Unexpectantly, similar to the building she worked in at night for Sensei and Dr. Daruma, the building the address belonged to looked very normal on the outside.

By 5:30PM Ayana was walking east along the main avenue, planning to catch the next available train to Hosu City. She was halfway to the station when a large commotion gathered in front of her, and as she began to push her way past the crowd determined to ignore whatever heroics that was going on and continue on her route, a massive explosion nearly threw her to the ground. In the next instant she became aware of shouting and screaming on the opposite side of the street, about thirty meters from where she stood. Ayana was rather intrigued by the scene, especially how the villain's entirely sludgy body enveloped a middle schooler. The boy screamed and swore profanities in pure anger. This boy was something; he seemed to have a lot of anger issues and didn't seem the least bit scared of his impending doom. Briefly, Ayana entertained the question whether his missing fear was because he trusted the pro-heroes to save him or because of something else.

"Stay back," a pro-hero, she recognized as Kamui Woods, shouted at her, though not specifically, and shoved everyone back with a sudden lash of his arm which extended out into a multitude of tree branches.

_How dumb, so many heroes and they can't even take down one villain? Such a waste of time._

With a now muted interest that was turning into annoyance, she watched as more pro-heroes turned up at the scene. A well-built hero with disproportionate large arms and a gruff look on his face charged at the sludge monster and rained punches into its side, all of which hadn't affected the villain in the slightest. Ayana thought that she recognized him as a hero at a smaller agency down the street from Endeavor Hero Agency but could not put a name to the face. The villain happily took advantage of his hostage's explosive quirk. Boom! Ayana ducked her head as another explosion was directed at the building above her and some debris flew over her.

"We can't engage the villain when he has the boy hostage. We'll have to do damage control until someone with a more suitable quirk comes to the scene." Another pro-hero shouted above the noise.

Boom!

Even the heroes this time ducked instinctively as more debris came flying down in the aftermath of another explosion being aimed at a building.

There were probably six pro-heroes on scene now. The newcomer Mt. Lady from the news in the morning had also arrived but because the streets were so tight and crowded, she couldn't use her gigantification quirk to apprehend the villain. On top of that, the villain sported the boy around as makeshift shield whenever the heroes tried to engage in a fight with him. Six heroes and none of them could save the boy or apprehend the hero.

_Useless. Is this just going to turn into a waiting game?_

What happened in the next few minutes surprised her, a young boy with green hair suddenly emerged from the crowd and started running towards the sludge monster, desperately clawing at his green goopy body to save the hostage who she assumed was his friend.

Ayana had the sense of a moment suspended in time. There seemed to be at least a thousand people standing at the scene with her. None of them moved. The traffic at the intersection had come to a standstill. And yet, here was a young boy running right towards the villain and shouting so desperately "Let him go! Let my friend go!" Somebody screamed beside her as the sludge monster formed a large sludgy hand to attack the boy.

"Save the boy!" The same pro-hero with big arms from before shouted, and she watched as three of the six pro-heroes darted forward in unadulterated fear for the boy's safety.

Ayana stepped off the pavement, a bit away from the rest of the crowd. She knew precisely what she needed to do but recognized she had to be subtle about it. Without the Puppeteer costume hiding her identity, she needed to be careful about using her quirk so freely. A familiar thrum flowed beneath her skin as she worked her body into producing pheromones that could send the villain into a deep sleep. But just as she was about to expel it out of her skin, Ayana felt a hand on her shoulder, holding her back from stepping any closer. She turned to see a large man looking at her, shaking his head, wordlessly imploring her to not get involved. Ayana stilled; she would have shrugged the man off if she didn't recognize him as the famous All-Might.

_Fuck._

She had already released the pheromones, and All-Might totally saw the sludge villain freeze unnaturally in the middle of an attack. She knew All-Might wasn't the brightest hero with an IQ of plus 200 but he didn't' have to be to put two and two together.

"What the f-fuck?" The villain managed to grind out through her quirk.

She grimaced internally. Was she out of her mind? Why didn't she just stay out of it? She needed to get out stat.

"Well, Mr. All-Might sir, this is your chance." Ayana mumbled to the massive hero beside her, turning her head away from him so he wouldn't get a second good look at her features.

There was a momentary silence. But eventually, she felt the large warm hand leave her shoulder and the man jumped into action. She quickly scurried back into the crowd and weeded her way through to make an escape before anyone could question her.

"All-Might! He's returned to Japan!" The crowd cheered around her.

It was clear the whole situation was going to be alright now that All-Might was in the mix. Ayana felt wretched about herself and how her whole week had played out with so many things going wrong. She had witnessed All-Might's power in the past as a bystander but never came close to touching distance with the man, and now the man had both seen her face and witnessed her use her quirk. The only possible saving grace was the fact that her quirk was virtually invisible and practically untraceable, and if it came to it, no one could produce any standing proof in court that she has the same quirk as the _Puppeteer. _But they didn't need that to put her in jail. If they took a DNA test, it would all be over for her, all the secrets she had been so desperately trying to hide would come spilling out. She couldn't let that happen, not before she completed her plan.

The spot where All-Might laid his large hand on her shoulder burned with a phantom fire. Something stirred within her. Ayana told herself that it would have been rash to try to take on the six heroes plus All-Might afterwards who'd likely try to apprehend her for vigilantism, but still wished she had been able to jump in the fray in front of the public and the pro-heroes. It would've been the perfect PR for the Puppeteer to show just how incompetent the pro-heroes were, how much of a _failure_ they were at saving people.

Ayana got off her train and began stalking down a road towards her meeting point, slightly dazed and irked, eventually stumbling down more turns until she reached where she was supposed to be.

Ping. She reached in her purse for her phone, it was a notification on Twitter from the people who ran her favorite podcast, _Capes and Lunatics: Witnesses claim Puppeteer was at the scene of the Sludge Villain incident twenty minutes ago. Stay tuned tonight at 7PM to find out #WhoIsPuppeteer_

As if to add insult to injury, the hashtag was among the trending topics, right up top in popularity with #AllMight, #SymbolOfPeace, and #AllMightHasReturned.

_Fuck me._


End file.
